The Omega He Gave Away

||11|| Welcome to the Pit

The descent into the lower levels of Frosthold felt like sinking into the throat of a dying beast.

As Mara led me deeper into the mountain, the air grew thick and heavy, saturated with the copper tang of blood and the acrid, chemical burn of low-grade Moonstone solution.

The clean, biting cold of the upper towers was replaced by a humid, stagnant heat that clung to my skin like a fever.

Every step echoed against the damp stone walls, the sound swallowed by the low, rhythmic thrum of the mountain's heart—or perhaps it was the machinery of the fortress, grinding away in the dark.

Mara stopped before a massive iron-bound door, the surface pitted with rust and scarred by claw marks.

She didn't look at me as she shoved it open.

"Welcome to the pit," she said, her voice devoid of anything but a cold, jagged edge. "Try not to get bitten. We don't have the supplies to waste on an Omega who can't watch her own back."

The room beyond was a nightmare of efficiency and desperation.

It was a long, vaulted chamber, lit by flickering torches that cast long, dancing shadows against the soot-stained ceiling.

Rows of narrow stone slabs served as beds, most of them occupied by wolves in various stages of agony.

This wasn't the clean, organized infirmary of Bloodclaw, where healers moved in soft silks and the air was perfumed with lavender.

This was a slaughterhouse trying to pass as a sanctuary.

The sound hit me first—a cacophony of low growls, wet coughs, and the rhythmic clanking of silver chains.

The scent followed, a suffocating mixture of rotting flesh, burnt hair, and the sharp, ozone-like smell of silver-burned skin.

"Over there," Mara said, pointing to a corner where a pile of blood-soaked bandages and rusted instruments lay on a stained wooden table. "That's your station. You'll start with the overflow. The ones the real doctors won't touch because they're too far gone to be worth the Moonstone."

I walked toward the table, my boots sticking slightly to the floor.

I didn't look at the men on the slabs yet.

I needed to see what I had to work with.

I opened the leather-bound ledger Raizel had given me, then looked at the meager supplies on the table.

A few jars of gray, gritty salve.

A bundle of frayed linen.

A single, dull silver needle.

"Where are the herbs?" I asked, turning back to Mara. "I need Cinder-root for the infections and Ghost-leaf for the pain. And the Moonstone solution... this smells like it's been diluted with river water."

Mara stepped closer, her eyes narrowing until they were mere slits of icy blue.

"You get what we give you. We don't waste the good stuff on the dying, and we certainly don't give it to a girl who might be poisoning our water supply by morning."

She reached out and snatched the small pouch of dried herbs I had managed to keep from my journey.

"I'll be taking these. For inspection. If you need anything, you ask me. And if I say no, you make do."

"You're killing them," I said, my voice low and steady despite the roar of anger in my chest. "Diluted solution won't stop the mineral rot. It only masks the scent while the poison eats the marrow. If you don't let me use the proper ratios—"

"If I wanted your opinion on our logistics, I would have asked for it while I was gutting you in the courtyard," Mara interrupted, her face inches from mine. "You are here to work, not to lecture. Now get to it. Or I'll find a slab for you, too."

She turned on her heel and walked away, her spear clattering against the stone.

I stood alone in the corner, the weight of the room pressing in on me.

I looked down at my hands, then at the first slab.

The man lying there was a mountain of a wolf, his chest broad and scarred, but his skin was a sickly, translucent gray.

A jagged tear ran from his shoulder to his hip, the edges of the wound blackened and weeping a dark, oily fluid.

I could see the faint, rhythmic pulse of his veins, but they weren't red.

They were traced with thin, spiderweb lines of obsidian.

Mineral rot.

The land's revenge for the Moonstones we tore from its heart.

The herbs were gone, and the pure solution remained out of reach.

All I had left was the knowledge my mother had drilled into me since I was old enough to hold a mortar and pestle—a survival kit built of memory and grit.

I stripped off my heavy outer coat and rolled up my sleeves.

I ignored the stares of the other healers—lean, exhausted men and women who looked at me with a mixture of suspicion and weary hope.

I picked up the dull needle and a piece of linen.

"I need boiling water," I said to a young pup who was hauling a bucket of slop.

He froze, looking at me with wide, startled eyes.

"Now. And a clean bowl. If you want this man to keep his arm, move."

The boy scrambled away.

I turned back to the wounded warrior.

He was conscious, his eyes a clouded, turbulent amber.

He growled as I reached for his shoulder, a low, vibrating sound that made the stone beneath my feet hum.

"I'm not here to hurt you," I whispered, my voice falling into the rhythmic, soothing cadence of a healer.

I didn't use the Royal Scent.

Not yet.

It was too dangerous.

Too loud.

Instead, I used the pressure points my mother had taught me, pressing firmly against the nerve cluster at the base of his neck.

The growl died in his throat.

His muscles relaxed, just a fraction.

"The poison is deep," I said, more to myself than to him. "But it hasn't reached the bone. Not yet."

I spent the next three hours in a blur of motion.

I used the boiling water to clean the rusted instruments as best I could.

I used the gritty salve, not as a cure, but as a base, mixing it with the scrapings of moss I found growing in the damp corners of the room—a trick for drawing out heat that the southern packs had forgotten centuries ago.

I worked with a cold, clinical focus that blocked out the screams and the stench.

I moved from slab to slab, stitching torn flesh, resetting shattered bone, and using my own limited supply of clean water to flush out the worst of the infections.

I felt the eyes on me.

The healers stopped their own work to watch the way I handled the needle, the way I found the hidden pockets of rot that their diluted solutions had missed.

They didn't speak to me, but the air in the room changed.

The jagged edge of hostility softened into a tense, watchful silence.

Raizel appeared in the doorway sometime after midnight.

He didn't enter the room.

He stood in the shadows, his arms crossed over his broad chest, his golden eyes tracking my every move.

He watched as I finished bandaging a young scout's leg, my fingers moving with a precision that belied the bone-deep exhaustion settling into my limbs.

Raizel stood in cold, heavy silence, offering neither a word of help nor a flicker of encouragement.

He merely watched, his gaze that of a predator evaluating the efficiency of a new tool.

I looked up, my eyes meeting his across the crowded, suffering room.

I didn't look away.

I wanted him to see the blood on my hands.

I wanted him to see the cost of his honest cage.

He stayed for ten minutes, then vanished back into the dark of the hallway.

"He's never watched a healer work before," a voice rasped from the next slab.

I turned.

It was an older wolf, his face a map of scars, one eye clouded over by a silver-burn.

He was watching me with a strange, unsettling intensity.

"He doesn't care about the healing," I said, wiping my hands on a damp cloth. "He only cares about the results."

"In Frosthold, they're the same thing," the old wolf countered.

He gestured to the man I had first treated, who was now breathing in a deep, rhythmic sleep.

"That pressure trick... haven't seen it used right in years. You've got the hands of a real healer, girl. Not like these butchers who only know how to pour diluted moonstone on a rot they don't understand."

"I'm just doing what I was taught," I said, my voice tight.

"There is no such thing as just being taught in the Borderlands," he whispered.

"You're either a miracle or a curse. And the King is still deciding which one you are."

Before I could respond, a sound erupted from the very back of the infirmary.

A sound that made every wolf in the room freeze.

The sound that erupted from the darkness was a hollow, metallic roar, transcending anything as human as a growl or a scream.

It sounded as if the mountain itself were cracking open under the weight of some ancient grief, the vibration rattling the stone floor beneath my feet.

The room went deathly silent.

The healers stopped mid-motion, their faces turning ashen.

Mara, who had been sharpening her spear near the entrance, went rigid, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the shaft.

"He's waking up," someone whispered, the words barely audible over the sudden, frantic clanking of heavy chains from the depths of the confinement area.

Raizel appeared in the doorway again, but this time he didn't stay in the shadows.

He stepped into the light, his expression a mask of cold, disciplined iron.

Ignoring the wounded and sparing not even a glance for me, he looked only toward the heavy, iron-bound door at the far end of the chamber, where the shadows seemed to be thickening.

The roar came again, louder this time, followed by the sound of stone shattering and the screech of silver chains being strained to their breaking point.

Raizel's hand went to the hilt of his blackened blade, his golden eyes narrowing as he stared into the dark.

"Mara," he said, his voice a low, flat line that cut through the rising panic. "Get the silver-tipped bolts. And clear the floor."

I stood my ground, my heart hammering against my ribs, as the air in the infirmary grew cold.

A different kind of cold than the winter outside.

The cold of a grave being opened.

I looked at Raizel, then at the door to the depths, and I realized that the honest cage was about to get a lot more dangerous.